“
We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.”
George Bernard Shaw
The guide books are all agreed about Roatan. Every description contained words like ‘idyllic’, ‘paradise’ and ‘marvelous’. They sang the praises of the azure waters, recommended the diving and yachting and generally adored the place. Beer had temporarily left the trip to visit El Salvador and I had, after much pondering, decided not to go with him even though the prospect of Roatan sounded perfectly dreadful to me. Foremost among my reasons was the rather excessive advice from the Foreign Office which gave the impression that anyone foolish enough to visit EL Salvador was likely to be murdered before they were across the border. Beer’s experience, related to me later, was that the most dangerous thing about it was the state of the pavements. Hindsight is a marvellous thing.
Roatan though hadn’t appealed either and it had been a close run thing. What swung it in the end was the word ‘hiking’ which featured prominently in all of the guide books. The other activities were out. Yes, it’s true I could have spent $200 on a diving course but given that I can’t see six inches without my glasses it seemed a ridiculous waste of money to be able to swim underwater with my whole world consisting of a blurry green emptiness. The same applies to snorkelling, swimming is fun for about an hour, lazing on the beach for about ten minutes and the boating and fishing trips were so insanely expensive that they were entirely out of the question. Nevertheless I arrived at Roatan with a plan. I was going to leave the group and spend the five days there hiking around the island. The first doubts started to creep in on the taxi ride to West End from the airport. As far as I could tell Roatan had one main road that runs along the 23 kilometre length of it and not much else. I modified my plan accordingly. By the time we reached our hotel I had decided to stay with the group and do a series of day hikes. My financial situation was getting ever worse. I was now on a budget of $13 a day and seemed to be unable to stop myself whining and whinging about it. People were being amazingly tolerant of my bouts of self-pity. Roatan is a popular spot and it’s reflected in the prices. It was clear that decent food was out of the question as was the idea of killing the time getting drunk. I was reduced to eating a slice of pizza for every meal and restricting myself to one carefully nursed beer in the evening. I was very conscious of the fact that I was wittering on and on about it but couldn’t seem to stop myself. I resolved to stay out of people’s way and not inflict it on anyone else.
Each day on Roatan managed to find something freshly depressing to throw at me. My walk on day two proved impossible because the rain was falling in such quantity and with such ferocity that it was painful to be out in it. I spent the whole day reading and rereading my one paperback, a rather dull whodunit from the truck library, and sulking in my room like a fourteen year old. I was however convinced that things couldn’t get any worse.
Of course the third day was worse. I actually started off in a slightly more positive frame of mind, which is always a sure sign that things haven’t yet reached the bottom. I woke up with the sun streaming in and the sound of the surf. I discovered a bakery where I could get a croissant, some raisin bread, a coffee and an orange juice for what even I had to admit was a reasonable price, and I had a walk planned. I was going to spend half a day hiking around the coastal path and then half a day hiking back. The coastal path is pleasant and pretty and leads through a maze of quaint rustic wooden buildings and docks and unfortunately dead-ends after about thirty minutes. According to the maps it carries on round but after a fruitless search for any continuation of it I gave up and retraced my steps to West End. I decided to set out along that tarmacced road and explore any side paths that it might have. Half an hour later I was a nervous wreck. The few side tracks I had explored had all dead-ended even more quickly than the coastal path - usually terminating in a locked and barred gate topped with barbed wire. The real problem though was on the road itself. It twisted and turned so that nowhere was there more than a couple of dozen yards clear sight line and it had no pavement and no gap between the road and the dense enclosing undergrowth. The traffic along it was divided into two groups. There were the taxi drivers in search of a fare who slowed down to a crawl touting for my business and were unable to grasp the concept that I was walking because I wanted to walk and taxi drivers with a fare who screeched along at lunatic speeds sometimes passing close enough that their mirrors clipped the edges of my clothing. After a dozen near lethal encounters my nerve gave way and I started to head back.
There was still worse to come. Almost at West End, a signpost to Flower Beach, pointed up a wide sandy road. I decided on impulse to check it out. It meandered up a not too steep hill and there was little traffic and things seemed to have started to look up. Half an hour later I was wondering where the beach might be but not very concerned if I didn’t find it. It wasn’t a very interesting walk though. The scenery was open and dull and moreover the sky had started to darken ominously. I had little idea of how quickly the weather could change. I carried on walking for a little way as the day grew gloomier and was pondering the advisability of continuing when the heavens opened. It was a downpour worse than the one that had kept me indoors yesterday - the difference being that this time not only wasn’t I indoors but there was nothing even vaguely likely to provide any shelter anywhere within sight. Roatan had chosen the moment when I was furthest from everywhere to hit me with a tropical storm. By the time I got back to West End I was wetter than the people just emerging from their oceanic diving lesson.
Sitting back in my room, munching on today’s pizza slice and reading my book again, I reflected that at least things couldn’t get worse. Will I never learn?
On my way back to my room after fetching my croissant and coffee the following morning I ran into Anne who was almost as fed up of Roatan as I was. She had a plan. She was hiring a jeep to drive to the other end of the island in search of somewhere different to be bored. I said I’d join her and accompanied by Gail and Vicki we set out. The jeep was an unroadworthy wreck of a vehicle. As we drove we catalogued the things that were obviously wrong with it ranging from trivial to potentially fatal. The air conditioning produced no perceptible difference in the vehicle apart from a high pitched whining that vied with my own for irritation value. There was a hole and dangling wires where once there had been a radio. The brakes worked only intermittently, either not having any effect at all or stopping us dead, not a good combination given that the horn didn’t work at all. The driver’s seat wouldn’t lock in position. The lights wouldn’t turn off even with the key out of the ignition. The doors couldn’t be locked. Third gear was hard to locate and second gear impossible. There was a hair trigger action on the clutch and the windows opened only a half an inch and then couldn’t be closed again.
All in all it was one of the worst wrecks I’d ever sat in although that put it roughly on a level with all the other vehicles on the island.
Our first port of call was the town of French Harbour which turned out to be a dirty little town with even less to offer than West End so we continued on without stopping to Coxen Hole which is bigger but in no way better. Gail and Vicki decided to stay there and catch the bus back to West End, Anne and I carried on along the main road. There were several promising side roads but whenever we explored one it ended in a partially completed holiday resort not yet open to the public. We kept on going and eventually ran out of road at Oak Ridge which at least had the merit of being pretty although we both agreed that we had exhausted its possibilities for diversion after about fifteen minutes there. We started back. Barely a mile later that jeep developed another fault, this time an insurmountable one. Half way up a steepish hill the engine stopped. No amount of coaxing could bring it back to life and between us we couldn’t find any way to open the bonnet with resorting to a crowbar. We were forced to hitch hike back as far as the airport where we phoned the hire company who brought out a replacement. By then though we had had enough. It might have been an interesting day but it hadn’t been interesting for the right reasons. Anyway the replacement jeep had a faulty exhaust and a misfiring engine. As we parked it back at the hotel and I stepped out the door handle came away in my hand. It seemed a fitting summary to the day so far.
It was enough for me. I gave up, defeated by Roatan, and spent the remaining days borrowing books and reading in the hotel. I tried the reading on the beach option for an hour but was soon a swollen red mass of sand fly bites so even that proved to be an unworkable solution. I couldn’t wait to leave the place as far behind as possible.
When we landed back on the Honduras mainland Beer was waiting full of tales about the beautiful women in San Salvador, the cheap beer and the gorgeous weather. Danger? Not a sign of it apart from those pavements. There were shopping malls and high class low cost hotels and everything geared completely to the needs of the tourists of which he was apparently the only one.
Every country in Central America has the same driving hazards - missing road surfaces, crater sized potholes, destroyed carriageways and mandatory detours along roads so waterlogged that the maps should mark them in blue. Across the border in Nicaragua to these were added ridiculous numbers of wild dogs and cats and a fair selection of stray horses, all blundering directly into our path as we made our way down to Leon and the Hotel Colonial. There really is no need to describe the hotel. If you close your eyes and imagine what somewhere called the ‘Colonial’ looks like you will almost certainly have a picture of it. Colonnades of pillars surrounding a genteel tree filled courtyard and all with an air of very faded elegance. The lobby was filled with wooden rocking chairs - in fact much of the town was inexplicably filled with wooden rocking chairs - and the place was in severe need of some redecoration.
I wandered around Leon looking at the ad-hoc redecoration that the people of the city had done. Clearly the former capitol is a city that has been both pretty and prosperous. The buildings that remain in a relatively complete state are almost all stylish and ornate but nowadays far more are falling down or at least dangerously precarious - a legacy of the civil war. Everywhere there are enormous pieces of elaborate graffiti. Every spare inch of wall is covered with it and it all has only one theme - the evil tyranny of the United States. Americans are not popular anywhere in Nicaragua, possibly because historically they love to meddle in the country’s affairs but have never been too sure about whose side they wanted to be on. They backed the Sandinista up to 1981 when they decided to change their minds and back the Contras. When the civil war broke out the CIA aided the rebels while the Nicaraguan Government obtained support from the Soviet Union. As a nation that had in turn supported all of the involved parties America became hated by practically everyone. So much for the history lesson. Nowadays the country is, temporarily at least, a little more stable although the signs of the war are everywhere. Much of Leon looks as if it would be a tough decision on whether to rebuild it or demolish it. The graffiti that covers everything shows the corpses of Nicaraguan soldiers, snakes in American helmets with CIA painted prominently on them or US soldiers slaughtering children. There are no half formed opinions here.
Other towns do not show the same levels of destruction. Managua, the present capital, is large and modern although it is a curious city with no discernible centre. Granada is smaller and more pleasant with an air of history hanging about it like cloak. Sometimes though it’s nice to see somewhere other than the big towns and our chance came by accident at San Juan del Sur. It had been our intention to camp on the beach but in their attempts to revitalise the country someone had built a hotel blocking the only route down that the truck could have taken. We drove into the town to look for somewhere else to camp and it very quickly became obvious that in such a small fishing village this was not going to be an easy task. Every time we found a possible site Helen tried to talk the owners into letting us camp but to no avail. For my part I was a little concerned that everywhere seemed to have high walls topped with broken glass or barbed wire which is never an encouraging sight. Eventually, as we were starting to get tired and disillusioned with the whole process a lifeline appeared in the form of a school. We could, they said sleep in a couple of the classrooms although as they had a fiesta evening on today we might find it too noisy to get an early night. We accepted the offer anyway. The school building was a little run down and it wasn’t clear exactly what age range the students occupied. At the front an otherwise bare room housed several computers while at the back, where we laid out our sleeping mats, it was clearly designed for infant or nursery children. There was a single standpipe for water and a very unsanitary toilet. Touching the light switches usually resulted in an electric shock and in several places bare wires poking from the plaster had been twisted together.
We had just finished our dinner when the first of the fiesta-goers arrived. It was an odd affair. It seemed to be some kind of cross between a disco, an amateur talent night, a big party and a parent-teacher evening. Children sang songs to a thumping taped accompaniment, a strange old man in drag mimed to a Barbara Streisand hit, there was a lot of merriment and dancing. Most of the town seemed to be there and most of them were very drunk. A rambling and incoherent Austrian aid worker clearly needed more aid than he was in a state to give although after ten minutes of wailing “Save the people, cry for the people” at the top of his voice he fortunately collapsed into a more silent stupor.
By this stage of my trip I had developed the essential skill of tuning out the worst noise imaginable so with the party still going on behind me I retired to the corner I had staked out for myself, crawled under my mosquito net and went to sleep. Tomorrow we would cross into Costa Rica, a country whose relations with Nicaragua have never been particularly good.
